Ludwik Silberstein

Ludwik Silberstein ( born May 17, 1872 in Warsaw, † January 17, 1948 ) was a Polish- American physicist.

Silberstein studied in Krakow, Heidelberg and Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1894 (On the mechanical conception of electromagnetic phenomena in insulators and semiconductors ). He taught from 1895 in Lviv, Bologna ( 1899 ) and at the University of Rome ( 1904 ). At the same time to his teaching, he worked in Rome from 1912 to 1920 for the optical company Adam Hilger Ltd.. in London and lectured at University College London. In 1920 he went to the USA and worked as a consultant for Eastman Kodak in Rochester (New York), where he retired in 1929. In the U.S. and Canada, he lectured on relativity theory, among others at the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto and at Cornell University.

In 1914 he published one of the first textbooks on relativity theory in England ( about the same time with a book by Ebenezer Cunningham ), "The theory of relativity", in which he also clearly pointed out the fundamental novel understanding of the theory by Albert Einstein. The book came out in London 1912/13, from lectures at University College. This was preceded by a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) 1912 in Cambridge over the quaternionic form of the theory of relativity.

In 1918 he published a separate theory of gravity as an alternative to Einstein's General Relativity (GR ), which did without the dubious in Silberstein's eyes equivalence principle and instead a constant in the space-time curvature was postulated independently of the existing masses. However, the theory was only one-sixth of the value of the perihelion of Mercury from Einstein's well coincident with the observation theory.

To have 1935, he said a mistake in Einstein's general theory of relativity found ( a static axisymmetric solution with two singularities corresponding to two point masses ), which led to a controversy with Einstein, which was echoed in newspapers, because silver stone his mistake did not want to see.

He also wrote books on vector calculus, optics and general relativity and translated books by Max Planck and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz into English.